Climate Change : The Coming Calamity

Humans are able to take care of themselves, of their families, their friends and perhaps even their countries. But apparently they aren't able to take care of their planet. Climate change is too large for our senses. It doesn't represent a sudden danger that befalls us. It is a more gradual one, a menace we have known for decades. It isn't a concrete, singular event, but a chain of dynamic processes. It doesn't just mean conflagrations, floods, poor harvests and climate refugees – all those horrors that we read about in the media. It also means the resplendent weather outside our front doors. "The nice is occurring in the immediate and individual, and the wrong is occurring systemwide," writes the American artist Roni Horn, describing what she calls the key paradox of our time. Specifically, she is referring to weather. The endlessly blue skies of summer 2018 were a symbol of that wrong.

When experts talk about the connection between weather and climate, they feel compelled to say things like: We are increasingly certain that the probability of extreme events increases as the Earth's average temperature rises. It would be more effective if they said: The forest fire outside of Berlin and the smell of smoke that caused thousands of Berlin residents to call the police on the morning of Aug. 24, 2018, was caused by the carbon dioxide that each and every one of us is responsible for.

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